Nehalem Vs. Shanghai

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Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., are finally back to where it all started when the personal computer boom kicked off in the early 1980s—squaring off with chips that bear more similarities than differences. That sets the stage for the kind of competition between the two main x86 microprocessor makers that has system builders like Brian Corn energized for a lively 2009.

"We're really going to be able to finally have an 'apples-to-apples' comparison on performance," said Corn, vice president of marketing at Source Code, Waltham, Mass., discussing how Intel's new "Nehalem" processors will stack up against AMD's recently launched "Shanghai" chips.

"The next statistic to look at is who has the best power consumption. If you can have both the performance and power consumption lead, that'll be the crown jewel. AMD's new 45-nanometer chips look great out of the gate, but Intel's holding back on all their information about Nehalem on the server side, so they might have an ace up their sleeve."

Corn first voiced his excitement about the upcoming battle between Intel and AMD more than a year ago, when he pinpointed the current convergence of the two chip maker's product road maps as the beginning of an epic battle for CPU supremacy. That's because the two companies took divergent architectural paths over the past decade, but in many ways return to the same general thoroughfare with the coming ramp of Intel's new Nehalem chips and AMD's 45nm Shanghai transition.

Intel's Nehalem microarchitecture, first represented in three Core i7 desktop processors released in mid-November, eliminates the Front Side Bus, integrates the memory controller on the die itself and independently powers each of the processor cores in these multicore chips for a "native" multicore design similar to the one that AMD embraced several years ago.

In transitioning to the 45nm fabrication process Intel pioneered a year ago, AMD will match its larger rival on that technology node until Intel makes its next major transition to 32nm late next year.

The first products to emerge in this renewed battle aren't exactly alike. Intel's first publicly available Nehalem products are desktop chips, including the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, a blazing-fast 3.2-GHz, quad-core processor with 8 MB of L3 cache that is priced at $999, or about $500 less than the top Intel quad-core built on the older Core 2 architecture. AMD, on the other hand, introduced its 45nm processor a few weeks ago with nine new Opteron server processors that feature higher clock speeds than the previous Barcelona generation for equivalent prices.

But as Intel and AMD build out Nehalem and Shanghai across more product lines, that "apples-to-apples" scenario Corn anticipates will really start to materialize. Intel already has Nehalem server chip samples in the channel, with parts for two-socket installations planned for release early next year and the full array due out over the course of 2009. AMD recently confirmed that it will release 45nm quad-core desktop chips to be branded as Phenom II beginning in early January. The top Phenom II part will be listed at 3.0 GHz, but AMD overclockers have actually taken the chip north of 6.0 GHz using liquid nitrogen—similar scalability to what's been shown in Intel's Core i7.

Next: Enter Nehalem

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